33.3 Europe: a.d. 1801 to 1900  (Page 15/27)

The Netherlands then overthrew French rule (with Prussian help), parts of Italy were lost again to Austria, English troops took the Scheldt and Wellington crossed from Spain into France (see page 1083). Unemployment and poverty was all over France and the stock market fell almost 50% in the year. The senate and legislature were in open revolt against the emperor and after a few more military set-backs with the allied armies driving westward and entering Paris on March 31, 1814, the senate deposed Napoleon and chose Talleyrand as President of a new republic. The Russian czar prevented the invading armies from pillaging Paris and arranged for Napoleon's exile on the island of Elba, with an annual stipend of 2,000,000 francs, which the French government failed to pay.

Louis XVIII, grandson of Louis XV, "59 years of age, genial and courteous, lazy and slow, fat and gouty"

On the island of Elba, Napoleon, with 400 of his old Imperial Guard and 800 volunteer grenadiers, continued to receive information about discontent in the French army, the fears of the peasantry about losing their land, the enforcement of Catholic worship and the continued Jacobin activity. On February 26, 1815 he loaded his men on 6 ships and sailed for the south shore of France. By March 20th he entered Paris again, never having fired a shot and having gained additional troops all along the long journey. Even General Michael Ney, sent by King Louis XVIII with 6,000 troops to stop Bonaparte, reversed his loyalties, turned and joined Napoleon's march and was with him as he resumed the exercise of power as Emperor of France. Ney was later to face a firing squad for this action.

But Napoleon's foreign enemies were now more firmly united against him than ever and their armies pressed in on him from all sides, even as he found that France was not truly all united behind him. The most immediate external danger was from Belgium, where Marchal Blucher had a Prussian army of 120,000 and the British Duke of Wellington had an army of British, Dutch, Belgium and German recruits totaling 93,000. In the hope of challenging these foes one at a time, Napoleon crossed into Belgium with 126,000 men. There were many battles on the flanks and the center, but the decisive defeat at Waterloo ended Napoleon's dreams, even as urinary tract stones and-gastric cancer were already beginning to end his life. One hundred days after his resumption of rule he again abdicated under force and was banished to St. Helena, 1,200 miles off the coast of Africa. There he lived, still surrounded by many of his faithful aides, reading many hours a day from some 400 books (70 by Voltaire) and eventually dictating his memoirs, until his death supposedly from cancer on May 5, 1821, at the age of 51 years. Recently one researcher has written that he believes he has positive evidence that Napoleon died of chronic arsenic poisoning